Falling
by Marianne Greenleaf
Summary: They can't stop themselves from falling. But perhaps they can help each other land.


_A/N – The culmination of Harold's and Marian's musings. Forms a trilogy with Sadder But Wiser and Just Someone to Love._

XXX

Marian is fallen long before Harold Hill's lips touch hers. She knows this because she wears her scarlet dress when she expects him to come calling on her: the scandalous, sheer, lower-than-usual necked gown she received for her birthday but hasn't dared or even wanted to wear until tonight.

She sits on her front porch, fidgeting anxiously with the ribbons on her bodice as she waits for him to visit. It was one thing to merely dream about romance, and quite another to actually encourage it. She almost regrets her choice of gown, and contemplates going inside to change into something a little more sedate. But then the anvil salesman storms by and the red dress serves its purpose, mesmerizing him just long enough to prevent his reaching the authorities in time to do any damage to the man she's starting to believe could be a real music professor if he truly applied himself.

But in his zeal for vengeance, Charlie Cowell has done some damage to _her_. When Harold Hill finally rounds the corner and bounds up the steps to greet her with a spring in his step and a gleam in his eye, she can't just fall into his arms, not even when his hand temptingly weaves around the small of her back to rest on the porch pillar she is desperately clinging to for support.

But somehow, they still end up standing face to face. As they gaze breathlessly at each other, Marian thinks that perhaps she isn't completely fallen, not yet. But she's still falling. She wonders what the bewitched would-be music professor sees in the soft glow of the porch light: a vision in scarlet, or a scarlet woman?

She can't let him kiss her until she knows the answer to this question. When he tries to wheedle his way to her lips with a soft whistle, she whirls gracefully out of his reach, like the sinuous lady trapeze artist she saw when Papa took her to Barnum's traveling circus. Just as it was then, her heart is in her throat: she doesn't have the safety of a net beneath her as she falls. And she doesn't know whether it's more dangerous to crash into the ground, or to let Harold catch her.

Yes, he has given her something, and she dearly wants to return the favor. But she's terrified of how much he might persuade her to give him in return: a boy with wavy chestnut locks and a sweet smile, or perhaps a girl with blonde curls and a dazzling grin. (A very small part of her – the part that once dreamed of cooing rosebud lips and sweet dimpled cheeks and plump little arms clinging to her when the possibility of marriage wasn't entirely out of the question – is almost tempted to… _let_ him. Mama would never cast her out, and she'd relish having a grandchild to dote on. Of course, the rest of River City wouldn't be nearly so understanding: she would not only be fallen, but permanently shattered.)

She ought to be appalled by her own imprudence, but she can't find it in herself to muster up the righteous anger that once came so easily to her. Because it isn't only lust that she sees in Harold Hill's eyes, not anymore. Mama thinks he's in love with her, whether he knows it or not. She isn't quite so certain, but something in her pleads to give him the chance to prove he's a better man than she's learned to expect from his sex in general.

So Marian stops worrying about tomorrow. She surrenders wholly to tonight and lets her heart lead her to the footbridge. She's falling, and he may be too, but for once, she lets go of needing to know exactly where they'll land.

XXX

As she sings her love to him in her beautiful soprano – and it's the best kind of love, the unselfish kind that demands absolutely nothing from him in return – Harold isn't falling in love so much as he's just _falling_. Or at least, it feels that way.

Or maybe that's what love is supposed to be like, and falling isn't a poetic exaggeration after all. Either way, when Marian pauses and gazes wistfully at him with those come-hither hazel eyes from all the way across the footbridge, he hastens to span the suddenly intolerable distance between them. He pulls her into his arms as she reaches out to him, and they don't tumble so much as leap off the precipice together. He doesn't know where they'll land, or whether either of them will come out unscathed in the end.

_It doesn't matter_, he tells himself as he stares into her bottomless eyes, and then leans in to meet her slightly parted mouth in a heated kiss. Right now – and he is a man who is very used to living in the _right now_ – the only thing that exists is Marian: the soft fullness of her lips as she kisses him chastely but avidly, the subtle but bewitching lavender scent of her curls as they tickle his cheek, the welcoming warmth of her body against his as she melts into his embrace.

When they finally part, breathless and panting, his head is spinning and he feels a disconcerting floating sensation in his midsection, like he's still falling. He thinks he finally hits the ground when Marcellus berates him for getting too distracted, and it actually hurts. But when he shoos his inconvenient shill away and bounds right back over to Marian, desperate to steal at least another hour with her before he has to catch his train, he's airborne again. Only this time, he's soaring high above the clouds: she tenderly tells him that not only does she know exactly what he is, she's known since three days after he came to town. Then she hands him the irrefutable proof that she could have used to destroy him but didn't, and kisses him again.

_Who's selling, and who's buying?_ Marcellus's question (that used to be his but somehow isn't anymore) buzzes around him as he stuffs the paper into his pocket and kisses the gorgeous, wonderful, inscrutable librarian back with everything he's got. He swats such mercenary thoughts away like bothersome gnats.

It isn't until later, when he's staring at that page torn out of a library book – he could hardly wrap his head around _this_ librarian committing such a sacrilege on his behalf – and properly waiting for Marian outside instead of stealing into her bedroom and seducing her, that he finally realizes it is love he's falling into. But by then, it's too late: the townspeople find him and tear him from Marian's arms before he can tell her the full measure of how deeply and unstintingly he reciprocates her feelings. 

And then much later than that, when he's somehow managed to come out of his comeuppance unscathed, he finds himself standing together with Marian on her front porch again. This time, he's dizzy with triumph and elation, and still very much head over heels for the woman who saved him. So Harold allows himself to think of tomorrow, and a great many tomorrows after that.

In the space of a single evening, leaving has become just as unfathomable as staying once was. He can no longer see himself endlessly riding the rails. Instead, he sees himself and the librarian ensconced together in a cozy cottage in River City, Iowa, the two of them running a successful music emporium with his skills in promotion and her musical know-how. (And maybe there would also be a little boy who's the spitting image of him, or even better: a little girl with the librarian's delicate beauty and fiery personality.)

When Marian beams at Harold and tells him he has the potential to be a truly great bandleader, and that she's going to teach him how to read music in order to give the Think System a firmer foundation than dream-castles in the sky, he feels like he could fly unaided all the way to the moon. When she looks at him with those shining hazel eyes and that soul-stirring smile, he believes he can actually learn to play a Sousa march on the trumpet, and maybe even a romantic sonata for her on the piano. For once in his life, he wants to be more than just a two-bit thimblerigger who spins grandiose lies, and Marian has shown him that he _can_ be a bandleader, a music professor – even a white knight.

He's still falling right along with her, and for once, he thinks carefully about where they'll land.


End file.
